On Writing: Katri Skala

When I started writing many years ago, I encountered a clutch of orthodoxies about the writing process. One came from an editor who asserted that I would only become a writer if I wrote every day and produced at least 400 words (Graham Greene apparently wrote 500 words every day, no matter where he was in the world, stopping at exactly 500, even if in mid-paragraph).

Another came from a group of friends engaged in doing The Artist’s Way (Julia Cameron’s bestselling self-help manual) who advised the only way to unlock creativity was to do morning pages; a third had to do with writing only what you know; a fourth involved writing in a notebook. Then there were the fiats issued in the first creative writing workshop I attended: no adverbs, show don’t tell, a protagonist with a batch of obstacles to overcome on the way to climax and resolution; relatable characters; and so on.

Years on, and many thousands and thousands of words later, I have come to one banal conclusion: to each their own process; to each their own technique. There are of course some basics: if you don’t get words down you don’t have a written piece of work in any form. Writing doesn’t happen in the head, or, not in the head alone. I’m the kind of writer who tends to need as much thinking as writing time. The thinking amounts to a fermentation and percolation process, daydreaming, work of the conscious and unconscious. This can happen anywhere, including during the hours when I’m at my desk.

The writing happens only when I’m at my desk. I work best when I’m completely immersed, freed from daily life with its sleeve-tugging demands. I was heartened to hear via a literary grapevine that Philip Roth needed three or four days to find the rhythms of his sentences if he’d been away from a novel-in-progress for any length of time.

This is a luxury few can afford and a consequence, generally, of early success. If you aren’t blessed with it, as I wasn’t, the struggle to make time and acquire creative momentum is demanding. However, when I’m working on a draft of something, I find it requires daily attendance if it’s to become anything at all; this at the expense of all else. When I go away from it, the difficulty of return is exhausting. That being said, I’ve also discovered that I can only sustain this kind of intensity in clumps of time – sometimes a fortnight, sometimes more, sometimes less. There will come a point when I slump. I’ve learned to honour the slump: it means I need time again to think, to ferment, to simply be.

Once I have something resembling a draft, I can then dip in and out, fitting the revisions into hours here and there during a usual working day or week. The late American writer and political activist Tillie Olsen wrote a sympathetic and important book called Silences about the problems women face in trying to carve time to write amid the competing demands of child-rearing and domesticity. She also wrote movingly about her own blocks. I found it a heartening book when I began to encounter my own ‘silences.’

I am a slow writer: I feel myself carving sentences as a sculptor finds the shape in stone. This is not a striving for perfection, rather an attempt at articulation.

Unlocking my creativity comes with painstaking attention to finding the best expression for the half-formed thing that is nudging up against the membrane of my language-brain. One word after the other, after another, into the unknown.  Sometimes, there will be a blurt, a rush of unbidden words. They are not always the best but the pleasure of the expulsion is great, and will often give me momentum to continue even if later I find myself deleting or re-working the blurt. I’ve learned over the years to accept this process.

I also only write when I have something I want to write. Writing per se, writing as a daily activity, or even a weekly activity, doesn’t suit me. It does others, just not me.

I tend to write when I have an idea: this could be a literary one (the first novel I wrote was a contemporary riff on the classic European existential novel, of the kind written by Sartre, Moravia, Camus, and more experimentally, by Sarraute and Duras); or it could be something someone has said that draws my attention to an aspect of human behaviour that for some reason tickles me; generally, it will involve some kind of an argument, something that I want to tussle with. If the idea remains with me over a period of time (months, even years) then I know I have something to work with.

I don’t write morning pages but I do keep a notebook to hand which I use a lot when I embark on a piece of writing. This allows me to think and doodle free-range; it releases me from the linear and orderly demands of a laptop; the act of scribbling from hand to ink to page works my imaginative muscle. I can capture a fragment, on the hoof, that has slipped into my mind; or I can write observations of something utterly mundane simply in order to find words regardless of whether they will fit into the work-in-progress. I often think the scribbling I do in my notebook is like a painter with a sketchbook.

If I write from ideas, these ideas will by and large be connected to things that dig into a set of enduring preoccupations; never, at least so far, however, have the things been autobiographical – not for fiction. One of my biggest bugbears is the assumption by readers that what you write must be what you lived. Writing fiction,  at its best, is the art of persuading your readers to spend time with a group of fictional people whose experiences you’ve spent an awful lot of hours writing into life. And of course the activity is completely useless from a more utilitarian perspective. And it takes time, time, time.

As for the numerous rules that seem to come with creative writing courses, workshop and manuals, the best guides I’ve had over the years have been the novels I most admire. I look to them in a ‘how to’ sense: how does Anne Enright, say, create a sense of the communal ‘we’ in the second part of her novel The Green Road? How does John Berger balance ideas and story in G?

I always read when I write. I search for books that will help with what I’m working on. For example, in the writing of my current novel A Perfect Mother I read a lot of books by male writers with male narrators whose lives were enmeshed in passions, sex, alienation; so works by John Berger, J M Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje, John Updike.  I also have a small number of people who read what I write as I go along, and then when I’ve finished a draft. I don’t fare well in groups; I tend become paralyzed by the multiplicity of responses, although I see from the work I do as a mentor how helpful they can be to others: the camraderie is important and can keep you going.

Was it Seamus Heaney who said something like, you start, you stop, you start again? How true!

https://www.hikaripress.co.uk/book-authors/katri-skala/ £15.00 in Hardback

Publication date: 1 September 2018

Author Bio:

Born in France of an American mother and a Viennese father, Katri Skala has lived in the United States and across Europe. She has worked as a senior arts administrator, script editor, and literary editor in the field of new writing in Britain and the US for a range of organisations that include Channel Four, BBC, the Manhattan Theatre Club, the Arvon Foundation, the University of East Anglia, and the Writers Centre Norwich. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in literature and journalism from Vassar (in the US), Cardiff and the University of East Anglia. She has had published short stories and magazine features. A Perfect Mother is her first novel. An extract was recently published in INK Anthology, a showcase of new writing produced for agents and publishers. She works as a mentor to writers in all genres and at all stages of their writing life.

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About A PERFECT MOTHER

A bracing, hypnotic story of mid-life crisis about the complexities of love, relationship and legacy.

During a visit to Trieste in Northern Italy to research his long lost great-grandfather, Jacob meets Charlotte and Jane, and the three are forced to confront their individual and shared histories. Their sense of themselves is challenged and they must piece together a future none of them saw coming.

A Perfect Mother asks big questions: What do we inherit from the broken histories of our parents and our grandparents and how does this shape our own sense of identity? Can we ever escape the past? Are stories, the ones we are told and the ones we tell, integral to how we know each other and how we love? What does it mean to be a good parent, let alone the perfect mother?

 

 

EXCERPT

He arrived late afternoon in the middle of October. It was his first visit to the city and it had taken him many years to get there.

The imperial facade of the hotel stood high above the lapping waters of the small bay. Delicate mist smudged contours. He had a curious sensation of being in Prague or Vienna, and seemed to himself to be in two different worlds, not quite knowing which was real.

A group of women were gathered in the lobby. They were speaking English, animated and loudly present in the cool interior. He wondered about them. Trieste was not a tourist destination at this time of year.

His room on the second floor had a balcony and sea view. He opened a window. A gentle drizzle was falling. Not much sea visible. Gulls circled and called. The sound of traffic rose from the busy arterial below.

He shivered and turned into the room. Faint sounds came from the corridor: a door opened, another closed, then women’s voices tailed off.

He unpacked, and lined up on the desk several books, against which he propped a photograph of his grandfather, taken sometime in the early 1970s shortly before the old man’s death. Standing in a garden, he wore a long jacket that hung from a skinny torso in awkward lines; melancholy.

Next to the picture, he placed an old postcard from Trieste in the late 1930s, written by his grandad’s father, Theodor. Satisfied, he then put on a fresh shirt and returned downstairs for a drink.

–

The bar was airy with a singular shell-shaped ceiling – baroque, he noted, but the design of the room was contemporary. Smooth marble floor like fluid. It put him in mind of a skating rink, and this turned his thoughts momentarily to last Christmas, neither white nor festive, when he had taken his sons to skate at Somerset House in London only weeks after he had left the family home; and in his memory, the pain of encounter slipped into the sharp sensation of cold as his arthritic limbs crashed onto the ice.

At the tall counter he ordered a grappa, the local drink recommended by guidebooks. The women he had seen earlier were now sitting in a corner chatting. He had an uncanny feeling of being watched. He turned to look more closely: on quick glance they ranged in age from early thirties to late middle age; and in their ease of appearance he saw prosperity and confidence. He also noticed one of them was set apart from the rest, seemingly on the alert, looking for someone, or something. She caught his eyes, lingered, and moved on.

The hotel seemed empty of people other than himself and these women. Murmurs of their conversation echoed in the large room. To his left a piano stood in an enclave, its gleaming black lid reflected a single hanging teardrop light. Shadowy bookshelves recessed into darkness. In that moment he felt he might see men in buttoned suits materialise out of the gloom, clutching bound ledgers as they would have done one hundred years ago when the hotel was headquarters of the marine insurance company that dominated the city. Or so he had read. The scene shifted to a memory of rough thick wool, scratchy against his young skin, wool from the jacket worn by his grandfather, a jacket unlike that of his father’s or any other grown-up of the time; a jacket from elsewhere, worn with tenacity by the old man, as if it were the only object left to him of a former life. Grandad … the old man appeared to him in his entirety, a ghost in the gloom of this seaside city. Stefan then, not yet Stephen, a young Jewish boy on a jaunt with his businessman father. Long gone.

He drank some more grappa.

‘Penny for them.’

He was startled. Standing next to him was the attractive stranger from across the room. He had not noticed her approach. She followed the greeting with a cheerful laugh and an apology. ‘I’ve been watching you,’ she said kindly. They introduced themselves. ‘Jacob Bedford!’ She repeated his name with relish. ‘I thought you were English.’ She looked at his clothing: a scruffy corduroy jacket and jeans; self-consciously he brushed some faint dust from his lapel. ‘Clothes, always a giveaway. Little game of mine when I’m abroad: spot the Brit. The men are never peacocks. Nice quality.’

This observation piqued his vanity and momentarily caused him to want to retreat; however, he responded with an enthusiastic acknowledgement. His infallible courtesy had often given rise to quarrels with his estranged wife. ‘You’d be pleasant to a serial killer rather than feel awkward,’ she had once said. He extended his hand in greeting.

The stranger’s name was Jane Worth. It inspired in him a flirtatious question which he as quickly repressed. He would not have been the first to play with her name. Did it suit her? He smiled inwardly.

She asked the young bartender for a bottle of wine and then turned to him: ‘Would you like a drink?’

He had often been picked up by women; a consequence, or so he thought, of a seemingly open manner and average good looks, both a matter of birth, he had reasoned, and as much blessing as curse in his life. Gradually, with the passing of years, the approaches had diminished. And now he was compelled to notice daily how his sparse, ambiguously pale hair exposed the pink of his skull; how from his tightened belt splurged a ring of flesh. How crooked his back and droopy his jaw. How fewer and fewer women looked at him when he walked into a room. His eldest son, Finn, at seventeen, was now taller than he was.

Jane Worth was closer to his own age than he had at first thought. Women can do that: tricks of make-up and light. Across the room had sat a handsome brunette in her thirties with a broad forehead and full mouth. In front of him stood a portrait of elegant maturity nudging fifty. Grey streaks and fine lines; fitted jeans and a green silk blouse. He nodded approvingly.

She sat on the stool next to him and in quick sentences told him she was a forensic therapist from Gloucester here with her book group. She sent the waiter with a bottle of wine over to the women. ‘They’re colleagues. We take it in turns to organise jaunts of this kind around a read.’ And what kind of book had brought a group
of professional women involved in prisons and mental health to Trieste? ‘Oh,’ she chuckled – it was a throaty teasing sound, and he warmed to her – ‘you seem like the kind of man who knows about books. I take it you’ve heard of James Joyce?’ He said he had. He pressed her to say more. ‘We’ve just finished a biography of Lucia, his daughter. Do you know about her?’

No, he confessed, he didn’t. Lucia, she said, had been born in Trieste and spent her childhood in the city. ‘And what about you? Am I close to the mark? Are you the bookish type?’ He shrugged and said he was a journalist. Didn’t she know that all journalists had at least one book in them?

‘Really?’ She rummaged in her bag for a pen. A prick of irritation momentarily stirred him.

 

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing